World's largest tunnel boring machine lands in Seattle

Known affectionately as Bertha, this tunnel boring machine has the widest diameter of any boring machine ever built; 57.5 feet. It's being used to dig a highway tunnel under downtown Seattle and it just arrived there today after being shipped from Japan.

Throwing out the non-dramatic elements like Mole-People, Morlocks, Sleestaks and CHUDS; disregarding dull engineering questions such as retrofitting all the earth removing equipment for pulling loose earth straight up and providing energy and support to the boring machine, I’m guessing it would get between 5 or 10 miles down before important stuff starting melting and/or catching on fire. Stupid upper mantle.

typing of boring, there’s a “# 3″: this amazing machine will cut a tunnel to carry car/automotive traffic under downtown Seattle (for a toll); so those that want to get us all out of cars, onto bicycles, and public transit understandably hate this whole thing (comparing it to Boston’s “big dig” etc). And to their credit, they’ve done a pretty impressive job of delaying it. although it’s in the default nature of Seattle that everything is bogged in endless nattering politics; we call it “the Seattle process”.

(for me) i just wish “Bertha” was going to stay in operation to give Seattle a proper subway system – but (see above) there’s fat chance of that.

Unfortunately it will most likely actually *increase* in-city street traffic due to cars avoiding the toll, further annoying those of us who are already out of cars onto bicycles and public transit. It’s boondoggle, IMHO.

Just for show, and yes it will. (I asked the same question when I visited the plant where they were building the machines to dig Seattle’s light rail tunnel.)

I just watched the new machine sail past my office window which looks out over Elliot Bay – days like this it reminds of a Richard Scarry book, all ferries and tugs and fireboats and helicopters and fishing boats and jets from two different airports.

Until it disappeared underground I travelled past one of the machines used for Crossrail (tunnel east-west under London). The whole machine was 150m long! It’s as long as a train, and includes it’s own small railway on the inside to deliver concrete tunnel sections to the cutting face.

It also has a much better name: Ada, after computer scientist Ada Lovelace. (See here).

Trivia: named “Bertha” after Bertha Knight Landes, the first female mayor of a major American city. Because when you think of the world’s biggest tunnel robot, it naturally brings to mind ground-breaking women politicians. Or something.

I used to work for Lovat tunnel, a TBM manufacturer in Toronto. It was my first “real” job out of school and I was the go-between bitch between engineering and the guys in the field. When we did a subway job in Toronto, I got to work a few days in the tunnel….AWESOME!!!!!